


Daffodil Lament

by Jenwryn



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: F/M, Family, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, Marauders' Era, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-04-22
Updated: 2008-05-03
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And the daffodils look lovely today." ~ The Cranberries.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Week Before Christmas

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by hpboy13's essay, ["Marauder Era Ships: Which Ones Sailed?"](http://www.hplex.info/essays/essay-marauder-ships.html).
> 
> NB: since having re-read HP&amp;DH, I have realised that Petunia is actually the elder of the two Evans sisters. I had always presumed that Petunia was the younger girl, and obviously I'm not the only one, since I've seen it various Potterverse fansites. However, when I tried to rewrite this story to make it canonical as regards the ages, it just didn't work; it only felt right when Petunia was the youngest. Thus, with this error of canon admitted freely, I otherwise wish you fun with the tale.

[December 1977]

It was the week before Christmas and that morning it had begun to snow. Petunia Evans opened her bedroom window and watched the fine snowflakes spiral down towards her, sucked in by the warm air of her room escaping outwards. A small ridge of snow had built up in powdery clumps along the very edge of the windowsill, and her pots lined up just behind it – empty looking because the bulbs in them were tucked away deeply beneath the earth – looked rather forlorn. But then, Petunia supposed she’d be forlorn if she had to spend the winter out in the freezing weather. She’d wanted to bring the pots inside but her mother had told her not to be silly. The daffodils would be perfectly capable of surviving the season outside, Mrs Evans had said firmly, and if they didn’t then that just showed they were a bad batch. Petunia had almost brought them in anyway, because they were a present from_him_and she didn’t want to risk anything happing to them, but when her mother had started interrogating her about why she was making such a fuss about some pot plants, Petunia had flushed and let it drop.

Apart from her concern about the bulbs, petunia rather liked the snow. She enjoyed the crisp sharp smell of it and the way that the snowflakes dissolved against her skin. It was falling quite heavily now that the night was settling in, and it slanted down on an angle and gleamed weird gold as it passed beneath the pools of light cast by the street lamps. The pine at the corner of their yard was decked in white and out on the curb petunia could see rows of rubbish bins, put out for the early morning collection, lined up like pale little robots amongst the snow frosted automobiles. Only the tops of the cars still glinted darkly in the yellow’d light.

The sixteen year old listened to the sound of_Mull of Kintyre_on her radio, grinned at the thought that she’d been promised the LP for Christmas, and then pulled her cardy tighter around hr. Petunia was skinny and the cold crept easily inside her bones, but for now she didn’t care, and returned to her study of the front lawn. At the moment it was a clean white sheet but it was almost dinner time and so, any minute now, she hoped—

The pine shook slightly and the lower branches lost their snow with a dull_thwump_followed by the sound of a high pitched boy’s voice whining and a flurry of familiar female laughter. Peter Pettigrew appeared literally out of mid-space, falling outwards from the snow and shadows beneath the pine, onto the edge of the driveway and screwing up his face in pain before shaking his head and grinning to show that he wasn’t really hurt. Petunia looked at him indifferently. She didn’t like Peter, not even a little bit. The worst thing about him was that he seemed to like here. That – and watching him grovel at the feet of James-stupid-Potter. Petunia wasn’t all that fond of James either, but peter was a worm, just like the stupid nickname he had.

Behind him, beneath the pine, a mess of footprints wandered back and forth in a crazy pattern, dark against pale, and the laughter turned into low, warm giggles. Petunia felt a moment of contempt at how stupid her sister and her sister’s boyfriend could be. What was the point of having an invisibility cloak if you didn’t even think about the fact that your footprints were there for the whole world to see? She was sure that if_she_had one, and a wand of her own, then she wouldn’t waste it on snogging beneath the pine tree, which was_obviously_what they were doing.

Peter said something up at them and then there was silence, before James pulled the cloak off and folded it up and Lily buried it in her back, then quickly replaited her hair. That was another stupid thing. If Petunia had hair like that, she’d do much more imaginative things with it than_that_. But she didn’t, and if wishes were ponies, Petunia would have had a whole racecourse full… Her older sister caught sight of her watching from her window and gave her a friendly wave, to which Petunia waggled some fingers half-heartedly. She watched the three of them stomping p the drive, shaking clumps of wet snow from their heavy boots as they went, and a few minutes later she heard the front door bang and the sound of the voices loud in the kitchen, competing cheerfully with the news program.

She wondered where he was and why he hadn’t arrived with the others. He’d said he’d come. He’d promised. She knew that all the Marauders were spending their Christmas holidays at the digs Sirius had bought himself._He’d_told her in an owl, told her in the same letter promising he’d come for diner when Lily brought James. Said that they’d all come. Frankly, she didn’t care about the others, but –

“Gah!” Petunia let out a small gasp of fear as a great big shaggy black dog jumped up beneath her windowsill, paws almost knocking her precious pots from their tenuous position, and then bared its teeth at her in a fishy-smelling doggy grin, tongue lolling. He must have slunk along the hedge, the horrid thing. “Get lost, Sirius!” she snapped in an angry voice to conceal how much his sudden appearance had scared her, and slapped him not at all gently on the snout. The grin turned into a low growl and she yanked her hands back quickly, cross her arms across her embarrassingly flat chest, and shoved her fingers up under her arms, as if she were simply protecting them from the cold instead of terrified that those teeth were going to rip them off. A moment later a boy stood before her. He smirked, then shivered a little in his t-shirt and said, “I really have to work on that, I mean, the whole clothes thing is great but I just haven’t got to jackets yet. You got something I could borrow, Tuna?”

She didn’t like Sirius Black either. Oh, he was as good to look at as you could come across, but obnoxious as James – worse, actually – and besides, he was mean. To her, anyway.

“No.” She scowled.

He laughed. “You need to loosen up, Tuna.”

She balled her hands into fists beneath her arms. “Don’t call me that, you stupid pig.”

Before the idiot could answer, Petunia caught a movement out of the corner of her eye and then_he_was there, his gloved hand on Sirius’s shoulder and an exasperated expression on his face.

Remus…


	2. That Familiar, Crazy Jiggling

  


  


_He_hadn’t come crammed under a stupid invisibility cloak for the fun of it like Lily, James and Peter, nor disguised as some dumb dog like Sirius. No,_he’d_arrived like a regular person, his slightly shabby coat-collar pulled up around his ears and his face slightly red from the cold. The moment she saw him she felt a silly little smile slip onto her face and no matter how grown-up she tried to be, she just couldn’t make it budge.

“Sirius,” he said, “for a bloke with a reputation as a sweet-talker, you can be a real mongrel sometimes, you know that?”

Sirius grinned broadly and held up his hands like someone protesting innocence. “Mate, as much as I like Muggles, she just isn’t my type. Besides – I thought you already had dibs.” And he chuckled to himself, made an obnoxious kissy noise, and headed off around the corner of the house to see if he could bludge a coat from Mr Evans.

Remus rolled his eyes at his friend’s retreating back and then turned to Petunia, shivering slightly in her window, and said “You’ll have to forgive him. I know you won’t believe it, but he really is a good sort.” Then he paused and a sudden smile split his face, the happiness crinkling his eyes and making the scars almost unnoticeable. “Hi, by the way. I didn’t mean to miss that bit, Petunia.”

That familiar, crazy jiggling started up in her stomach. Barely anybody else called her by her name-proper, and those that did made it sound like something belonging to a forty-year-old spinster with a teapot collection and too many long-haired cats. But not him, not Remus. Somehow he managed to transform it until it just sounded… nice.

“Hi to you too,” she said in a small voice, pulled her hands back out form beneath her arms and started to pick at the wool of her cardigan. She should have worn something different. “I got the job at Grunnings,” she added with a rush of sudden excitement.

“Oh, that’s great, Petunia!” he exclaimed with a beam, leaning against the windowsill after having brushed away the small ridge of snow. “And your Dad’s still good with it?”

She nodded. “I guess he figures I may as well be doing this as anything else. Though I still think he only let me leave school and attend that secretarial college because he was so overjoyed by the letter announcing they’d made Lily Head Girl, but – I suppose once I’d done it, there was no turning back. He mutters a bit, though.” She bit her lip as she realised, too late, how bitter that had sounded.

Remus pretended he hadn’t noticed. “I still think it’s cool that you got the first job you applied for. I was starting to think, when no answer arrived to my owl, that you’d either been turned down and were too upset to write, or that the owl had gotten lost or something. I should have guess you were just saving it up!”

She grinned, deeply gratified by his reaction which was so much better than the one her parents had give her (_“Oh that’s wonderful, darling. Here, darling, did you read what Lily wrote about her Potions Professor?”_), and then grinned a little more as she watched his gaze settle upon the flower pots. “It’s the daffodils you sent,” she whispered into the snowy air between them.

“I thought it might be.” He smiled, but somehow there seemed to be something oddly sad about him.

“They’ll be wonderful in spring, Remus. If only you could come visit over Easter – but Lily never bothers coming home for that. I doubt they’ll still be flowering in June. But they’ll be green, I suppose, so at least you can see…” she trailed off as she realised that her happiness was having no effect. “Are you okay, Remus?”

She knew he was ill a lot – that he had some kind of sickness – but mostly it just made him tired and haggard looking, not sad. To her experience.

He pulled off one of his gloves, finger by finger, and shoved the glove deep into the left pocket of his coat. Then, to her delighted astonishment, he reached out and cupped her face with the bare hand. It was surprisingly warm, his hand, but still it made her shiver.

“There’s a war going on, Petunia. Not outright, yes, but people are dying, you know. In our world.”

Her pleasurable shiver transformed into a little shudder instead and she put her hand instinctively up to cover his and said in a miserable voice, “I know that. How could I not know? Apart from a bit about school and James, it almost all Lily writes about now. You Know Who this and You Know Who that, Remus, I_know_. Can’t you just – perhaps – come and live like regular people and then—” She realised she was babbling like some silly little kid, and trailed off.

Remus smiled wryly at her use of the adjective_regular_. He’d known her long enough to understand how important that was to her. Normality and Petunia Evans had a long and complicated relationship. There was little she strived for more and yet the harder she did so, the further it seemed to slip from her grasp. Here she was, sixteen, a Muggle girl with the UK Top Forty playing in her bedroom, wearing the same clothes that all the other Muggle girls were wearing, doing her hair the same way all the other Muggle girls did… Remus knew about Muggles. He’d been born to one himself, and grown up in their world, and then there was Sirius with his Muggle fixation and – and Remus knew that Petunia was a religiously_normal_Muggle girl for her age, and even more desperate to be a normal Muggle woman. Look at the way she’d left school to get this job at Grunnings. And yet—

—and yet she was one big contradiction. Because he’d seen the way she watched them doing magic. He’d seen her delight at the owl he’d given her last Christmas, after he’d saved every Knut he could get his hands on, so that their letters could be more frequent. And he knew how much she longed for what could_never be_. He told himself regularly that she should just pick one side of the fence and stay on it, and that it was wrong of him, who was a year older and should know better, to be encouraging her in both, but—

—but then he’d remember her eyes when she looked at him. Like now, standing there with the bright light of her bedroom behind her and the snow’s gleam reflected on her face, and the snow caught on the edges of her hair, and looking at him like_that._

It was strange. Sirius made fun of her and said she was horsey. James wasn’t much better, making snide comments about beanpoles, but at least he restrained himself and didn’t do it in her hearing. Even Lily, who was practically a saint with everyone else on the planet, wasn’t exactly flattering about her sister.

Remus supposed it was just that none of them had ever been at the receiving end of those soft, pleading eyes of her. Eyes that opened up her whole soul and offered it bare on a plate for him to do with as he would. He’d never had someone treat him with such unquestioning faith. She, who so longed for normalcy, had gone and chosen him…

  


  



	3. Daffodils Last That Long

_She, who so longed for normalcy, had gone and chosen him…_

A small groan slipped unwillingly from the base of his throat and his hand slid from her chin around to behind her ear, and her crazy Muggle-style earrings, and he leant in – and kissed her. Petunia stood frozen still for a moment, lost in a curl of delight and petrification, and then she put her own hands out, wrapping them against the nape of his neck, fingers somehow twining themselves in amongst soft brown curls, her stomach lurching out of recognition – and kissed him back. At least half of her was convinced that she’d do it all wrong somehow and was panicking with worry, but the other half just sank into it and enjoyed the ride. Then his lips left hers gently and he pulled back slightly. Her hands loosened their grasp but remained around his neck, while his brushed down her hair that he’d mussed up, as he memorised the way her cheeks had pinkened and how her chest rose and fell fast. He knew it was her first kiss and he was secretly rather proud of the reaction he’d achieved, a grin just as silly as hers stamped across his face.

He traced a finger down along her jaw and said softly, almost as if he’d never broken off their earlier conversation, “There’s a war on, Petunia. And when we’ve sat our NEWTS and finish school in June, we’re going to be sucked into it. James and Lily, they’ll have their heads full of grand noble thoughts and moral crusades – but that’s because they’re better wizards, better people, than I’ll ever be. Sirius – he’ll be up for the adventure and the chance to go against his mother that little bit more. As for Wormy… he’ll just go along because James does, and we all know he’d stick his head in a dragon’s mouth if James asked him to.” He shrugged and grinned.

Petunia grinned nervously back. Talk of dragons made her uncomfortable, but less than it normally would, because it was Remus saying it. She’d thought long and hard about what the difference was and she hadn’t been able to find a convincing answer, but she suspected it was just that she trusted him. She so rarely saw his actual wand that sometimes she forgot he had one, and she was certainly never scared that he was going to whip it out and hex her or something like she was with the others. And then – he had such a soft way of talking, that made even dragons and Dementors sound less frightening.

“And you?” she asked softly, “Will it suck you in too, Remus?”

He nodded.

She bit her bottom lip, then said, in an uncertain voice, “But – do you have to? I mean, we have wars too, and sometimes people have to fight but – I mean, even the Americans are starting to complain about Vietnam and—” She fell silent and then said, “Do you have to fight?” She felt suddenly terribly old and dry.

He frowned, glanced at the dark sky and pulled his hands away from her in a smooth, gentle movement and hid them in his coat pockets. “I do have to. I have a – a debt to settle with – with someone on You Know Who’s side, someone who – who – who did something – bad – to me when I was a little boy.”

They fell silent. Her, because that sounded too much like one of those things that she’d be afraid to talk about (she had a vague and uncertain image of choir stalls and she didn’t know why). Him, because of his uncomfortable knowledge that he had never told Petunia what he was. He’d promised Lily that he would. Two years now he’d been sending Lily's Muggle sister letters, since Petunia was fourteen and they’d met when Lily had invited him home for Christmas dinner. Back then, back in the days when she’d still loathed James with a passion, and had spent half of her time with Remus and Severus instead – although not at the_same_time, of course. And when Remus had met Petunia, well… he’d worried that her parents might be a bit odd about it and so in the beginning he’d addressed the letters to the whole family, but her folks hadn’t minded either way and soon the letters had become Petunia’s alone. But in all those letters, in amongst all those words exchanged, he’d never told her that one thing, that one most important fact about him: his condition, his disability. That one thing that made him an outcast, an aberration – abnormal – even in the wizarding world.

Petunia watched him as he just stood there and she sought desperately in her mind for something to say. Oh, why was she such a_kid_? How could she talk about work – about filing cabinets and making tea and addressing envelopes – when he was walking about wars and vengeance and dying? It was―

“Impossible,” he whispered.

She jerked up her eyes and stared at him. “P-pardon?”

He shrugged helplessly. “You, this, us, life.”

Petunia forced a small smile onto her face. “You sound like that Snape boy when you talk like that. He’s always spouting philosophical nonsense. Or at least, he was.” She looked curious despite herself. “Do_you_know why he hasn’t come home for Christmas this year? I mean, not that I blame him. Lily’s treated him awfully, not that I care, and then―” she dropped her voice to a whisper and continued with a glance around them as though someone might be eavesdropping, “I’m sure that awful man hits her. His mum, I mean. I couldn’t be sure, but – well, I wouldn’t come home if they were_my_family._" Actually, I wouldn’t come home full-stop if they’d ever let me into Hogwarts._

Remus’s eyes narrowed. Personally, he was pretty sure that Snape hadn’t come home because he was off playing Death Eaters with Malfoy and Mulciber, but he didn’t say that aloud. He had a suspicion that Petunia wouldn’t cope well at the thought of their war being connected that close to her home. She didn’t seem to have understood that it wasn’t only in_his_world, but in hers too…

Petunia was starting to wind up into a knot on the inside. Part of her felt like just dropping the whole stupid conversation altogether and telling him instead that one of the clerks, a great big blonde, had invited her to the movies and she’d jokingly said she’d think about it, but that of course she had no intention of going. And especially not now that Remus had kissed her. She glanced at him, and wondered if he’d do it again.

As though he’d read her mind, he did. This time he reached right through the open window to hold her and, when their lips parted, he put his arms around her, his face in her hair and said, in a miserable voice, “I don’t know how often I’ll be able to write to you, Petunia. I’ve got my NEWTS to study for and then…”

“And then you go fight,” she muttered in a colourless voice, the windowsill cutting against her painfully.

“Yes,” he admitted. “But maybe the war won’t last so long. Maybe by the spring after, I’ll be free man…” His face looked bitter and ironic at that, though the irony was lost on Petunia.

“Daffodils last that long,” she said softly.


	4. Post Brought By A Bird

_“Daffodils last that long,” she said softly._

“Daffodils do, yes.” He paused and pulled away, hands back in his pockets, and looked at this strange, sensitive Muggle girl that meant so much to him. He smiled sadly. “Don't wait for me, Petunia. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

“Don't be silly. Of course I'll wait for you. And besides, you have your whole life too!”

“No – don’t, Petunia. There are – there are things you don’t know that―” He frowned. “I’m sorry. I want to tell you but I just can’t, not yet, and…” He shook his head, pulled his collar back high around his ears and stepped abruptly into the flurry of white snow. Petunia watched in silence as his lonely figure moved past the rubbish bins and out of sight.

“Tuney!” shouted Lily and burst into the room, beaming. “Guess what Dad just – oh.” She fell silent, looking at her sister’s expression. “Do you have Remus hidden away in here? Because you know Mum said―”

“Of course I don’t!” snapped Petunia, angry and still a little flustered by that kiss, and the way he'd just vanished. “He just took off, okay?”

“Oh Merlin’s beard. So he told you then, like he promised?”

Petunia looked at her sister blankly, but Lily, lost in imagining what it must have cost her friend to share his secret like she’d asked him to, didn’t notice. “And you’re okay? I mean, I thought you’d be in tears at the very least, knowing you.”

Before Petunia could demand to know what she was babbling about (_did_Remus have someone else? Some clever witch with a wand and a Hogwarts uniform? Was that what he’d meant?), James poked his head around the doorframe, caught the last few words and drawled, “Ah, the werewolf conversation’s been dealt with then? Bit the silver bullet, did he?”

Petunia stared at him, his words making panic rise up in her, and she felt a little inclined towards dropping dead. “What are you on about, James?”

“His furry little problem, of course, good old Moony and his monthly lunacy, I―”

James Potter let out a grunt as his girlfriend elbowed him hard in guts and hissed fiercely, “I don’t think he_had_told her. Oh, Tuney…”

Petunia wasn’t stupid. She could put two and two together with the best of them. But she hated the tears in her eyes. “Are you saying that Remus is a – a – a werewolf? As in – a werewolf?”

Lily nodded, and looked tired. “It’s not as a bad as you think, though.”

“Actually it is,” butted in Sirius, who’d appeared beside James with a grin, and seemed to be finding the whole conversation enormously amusing. “You should see him chasing chic―”

“Stop it! Shut up! Get out! GET OUT!” she screamed. They left. And Petunia Evans sat down on her bed and burst into tears. Why hadn’t he told her? He didn’t trust her. He thought she was a child. He didn’t consider her one of his world. And she’d thought – she’d thought―

What a stupid little girl she’d been.

* * *

[March 1978]

Mrs Evans had been right about the daffodils. They came up strong and vigorous that spring even despite having sat under snow over winter. But by then Petunia was barely at home long enough to notice them. She was working hard and had moved from being the Girl Friday into the job of a proper secretary. And the young clerk who’d asked her to the movies was busy taking her out most weekends. He didn’t talk that much and when he did it wasn’t that interesting, but Petunia had realised that that wasn’t as important as she’d once thought. The main thing was that he seemed to like her. And he was normal. Very, very normal. Nothing exciting – nothing to hide. Nothing to hush up. She thought that he might ask her to marry him. She thought that if he did she might say yes. After all, Lily was already as good as engaged and_she_hadn’t even left that stupid school of hers. Petunia would show them all that she was just as good as Lily. She’d show them that she didn’t care about wizards and their stupid wars.

If she ever looked at the daffodils and got damp eyes, she blamed it on hay fever.

As for Remus, who perhaps had heard what had happened from her sister, well, he never did send another letter. At least, that was what Petunia told herself. Either way, she’d refused to take notice of owls.

Who wanted post brought by a bird anyway?


End file.
